Potential third Edinburgh tram route unveiled by council with new stops at Hearts and Hibs grounds
A new map of a possible future tram network has been unveiled by the city council, with 12 new stops including at the homes of Edinburgh football clubs Hearts and Hibs.
The diagram shared with our sister paper The Scotsman shows a further 10 new stops including Morningside Road, Newington and Hillside, and an interchange with the planned north-south tram line at Cameron Toll. Stops on that line are also shown.
This potential new third line would use Edinburgh’s south suburban railway, with a new connection to the existing route on Leith Walk. The line’s stations closed 64 years ago but it has since been used by freight trains and as a diversionary route.
The map is described by the council as a “conceptual representation of what a future integrated multimodal network may look like for Edinburgh”. More robust “tram-trains” would be needed because of the rail line’s higher speeds.
The map shows the line, which branches off west of Haymarket, with stops at Gorgie East (for Hearts’ Tynecastle stadium), Craiglockhart (for Edinburgh Napier University’s campus), Morningside Road, Blackford Hill (for the University of Edinburgh’s King’s Buildings science campus), Newington, Cameron Toll, Duddingston & Craigmillar, Fort Kinnaird, Brunstane (Borders Railway interchange) and Portobello.
The tram route is expected to branch off the line onto streets around Meadowbank, with stops at Abbeyhill (for Hibs’ Easter Road stadium) and Hillside - probably on London Road - before linking with the existing Edinburgh Airport-Newhaven tram line at Elm Row near the top of Leith Walk.
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City of Edinburgh Council transport convener Stephen Jenkinson said he was excited at taking a closer look at the railway line as a possible tram route.
He told the Rail in Scotland conference in Edinburgh, organised by Modern Railways magazine: “The north-south tram proposal is the priority at this stage that we’re working towards.
“The proposals for the south suburban railway have been discussed over many years.
“When the latest proposals were brought forward last year and we started looking into it in a little bit more detail, I saw it as a complementary measure to the north-south proposal.
“It’s not an either/or. It’s an additional element of the overall network.
“It’s the technological development of tram-train that makes it much more realistic - that we can have rolling stock rolling off between traditional railway lines and on-street.
“The technology has caught up with the ideas and it’s quite exciting to explore these things in more detail.”